One year ago today: February 6, 2015, Skaw-TAAAAAAYYYYY!
Five years ago today: February 6, 2011, they self-extinguish.
Nine years ago today: February 6, 2007, 1/17th acacia juice.
Random years ago today: February 6, 2013 , world’s most expensive sawhorse.
MORNING
That’s great. After I canceled my weekend jaunt, the weather went nice around mid-morning. Rather than waste the day, I build my first belt sander. Complete with a small tray and cord caddy. Works great, at first I had a footswitch but decided it was just as easy to operate the regular switch. She’s not quite finished and I’ll need some 80 grit belts from Harbor Freight. I can tell how excited you are about this, so here is your morning picture.
Everything is fully functional, even the dust vent around back can easily be clamped to a vacuum. Which is something I have to seriously consider soon. Sawing is controllable but sanding certain materials including some woods is known to be harmful. And in some instances, poisonous.
I’ve identified my target [real estate] market for my low-ball offers. This is not any kind of commitment to specifics, but basically after a few unforeseen delays, I have the cash money to wave under some noses. I hope to find somebody who has to sell. No mercy. I know very few people have any cash these days and so does anybody trying to sell a lower-priced piece of property. What do I mean by lower priced?
That would be a place that is listed for $50 or $60,000 and that sold for close to twice that before the events of 2008-2009. I filter for all places that sold for up to $120,000 within living memory. Then I find the houses selling for my price range and offer them half what they are asking. Cruel? I don’t think so. I’m not forcing anybody to sell anything, and a lot of the times the seller is a bank anyway. Florida has no unique market practices, they just ain't that smart. But it has some weird contortions and combinations of the regular practices. Like lying through their teeth both exhaling and inhaling.
Top of that is how a place that is listed more than 30 days generally has something wrong with it. That is part of our game plan. If it is something fixable by us, we’ll take a look. But at this stage, nobody is getting more than half their asking price out of me. There’s one exception, however it is exceedingly unlikely anybody would go for it. (And that would be near total owner financing that effectively gives me the place as long as I make the ridiculously low payments.)
Did anyone catch how recently Trump is epitomizing liars with New York real estate agents? Maybe Florida is not the worst. Now, pay attention to my wording. The Florida versions are like those of a certain religion everybody loves to hate, but I'm not saying. I'm not saying they are total liars, I'm saying if you conduct your affairs as if they were, you will experience less disappointment. Let them argue my point.
Today’s green article. Who runs the biggest recycle operation in America? Landfill operations? Soda bottle depots? Nope, it is eBay, followed by Craigslist. This is serious business. That’s offset when you ship something from California, where most people do not live. I’ve had as much to say as anybody else about how eBay is a shipping company in disguise. The average eBay user spends $210 per year. Careful, that’s not per capita, only per user.
And another thing to be careful of is what gets recycled. Some unscrupulous operators have done things like sell defective recalled vehicles, tools, and chemical products on-line. They will also buy your stereo, take out the expensive hard-to-get part, replace it with their broken part, then claim it doesn’t work and eBay will compel you to give them a refund. When they say green is big business, like politics, that’s no guarantee of honesty.
Dust storm.
NOON
Going on about real estate, here is a place of interest today. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, as you see, a nice shady lot. Built in 2000, the asking price is $36,000. I’m offering about half, or what the seller paid for the place back in 2002. It will be rejected, but then I sit back and wait. I know that area has 60% unemployment, maybe the seller is one of them.
It’s weird but sometimes the crime map changes colors as you zoom in. Well not weird, since I’ve cracked their algorithm that makes the crime colors relative to the area being viewed. Big map; more crime. This is a quirk in Trulia. Still, any buyer who looks at the big map is only going to see that orange downtown and steer away. The subdivision is actually seven miles away.
The front yard looks a little scruffy and it doesn’t appear that a vehicle has been parked there in some time. Also, the skirting has visible mold or moss and I don’t like that flight of stairs to get into the place. Maybe it is on a floodplain or something. It has a huge kitchen and dining room.
Anyway, I have nothing to lose by waiting, so now we begin the waiting game. I’m neither here nor there and having more than one outstanding offer in a small town where there is a good chance the sellers might know each other. Because I worth through an agent and I would just tell them the agent sold me the place for what they’d been asking. Ha, that’s a burn.
A place like this is the compromise worked out with JZ. It is a decent place to live if it comes to that, but is intended to be a springboard to find local bargains. Once we have a place in the area, it will be a matter of a few months before we are poised to buy again. And as for this place, sure as hell I’d live in something like that. You don’t need a mansion to roam the empty hallways like the empty-nesters I know.
I would quickly have a carport or garage and a decent work shed in the back yard. And some privacy landscaping. No trees in the front yard looks hillbilly to me. You know, they bought a place so they want the whole world to see it. Not me. Up goes the hedge asap. This particular place is pristine on the inside, (huge kitchen) so it really needs nothing but a better yard to double in price.
NIGHT
Who remember’s NeverWet, the spray compound from Rustoleum that repels water? I have a set, it’s two spray cans. The base coat and the overcoat. At $20 a pop, it is not that useful. You see, if you spray it on anything clear, it gets cloudy. And the coating wears off. The only thing I’ve ever used it for is on the seat of my scooter. The original fabric was water repellent, but it finally tore. I covered it with black duct tape but that needs to be mopped after any rainstorm. So I’m gradually using up my supply of NeverWet.
It’s been pointed out that Trump speaks the truth. But he speaks it so loud and often that simple-minded people get confused and offended. I watched the highlights of his rallies and interviews from my feed, but confess I really don’t follow politics enough to take sides. That doesn’t mean I don’t know smoke and mirrors when I see them. And the other candidates are getting desperate. Starting to pull dirty tricks, like I heard one guy announced on election day his opponent had quit. Another printed up forms that looked like government threats that people had to vote for him.
Trump is in by a landslide and I’ve said that since day one. But he should back off a little on the $150 billion to Iran. You don’t have to be an accountant like me to know that money was Iranian assets that had been frozen in US banks. But people would just argue the US should have kept the money for the cost of the war. Others like me would say the US had no business getting involved in that war. End of politics for today.
ADDENDUM
Totally concerned with music and bands. You can skip this addendum and miss little.
The old band finally cropped me out of their best promo photo. I just smirk that it took 14 months. I have worked harder, but I’ve never put so much into a band and had so little effect. They had a strong pact between them not to allow any bass player to have even one iota of say in the band. Toward the end, that policy got utterly ridiculous. The drummer could drum, but that’s about where he should leave things. He has limited “musical sense”, doing all the things that never worked (demos, t-shirts, press releases) and expecting credit for it.
Three of them, then four, and they still could not stop the crowds from listening to the bass man. This is not, as Trump says, "braggadocious", this is determined 100% or more by the crowd applause-o-meter. Got that, Glen. 100%. And I'd gladly show the videos if anyone wants to pay for the effort. And while you are at it, teach me to spell braggadocious.
You initially go along (with this asinine anti-bass policy) because practice is in his house. But that only lasts until you realize very little happens except practice. I do not know if they agreed between to never let any bass player have any input or whether it was just me. They certainly had a very bad attitude toward bass playing in general. Band decisions were a closed loop that excluded the bass player, I was informed of decisions afterward. “We are going to play Strawberry Fields Forever”.
There was one curious situation that lays bare what a dictatorship that band was. They knew I was a country fan when we met, so follow me closely here. You know when the band is tuning up, it is a given that when each musician finishes tuning, he’ll play a short riff. I do it to confirm I am not exactly one tone off on any string. I’ve had that happen on dark stages where a tuner goes green on the wrong note. So I’ll generally play some Flatt runs. Stay with me, I haven’t made my point yet.
If any of the other musicians played a country-like riff, no big deal. The guitarist regularly riffed off on the Andy Griffith theme, for instance. But if I played even two consecutive notes of a known country lick, the drummer would snap at me. “Oh no, we ain’t going there.” He was totally closed-minded on the issue. Finally, now I get to what I was getting to. Laugh at this.
The supreme blooper on his part was one time I played the walking bass line to one of his chosen tunes. It has a country feel to it and he damn near hit the roof, he’ll have none of that noise in his house. The piano player looked at him and explained it was the Moody Blues. The drummer did not apologize. It goes to show you how he was actively so anti-country he got scary.
He was so on the lookout that he did not even recognize that it was the bass riff to a tune we played every week. That means he never even listened to what I played, only whether it was country or not. Now how weird is that? Like I said, I never played in a band before or since where I had so little impact. It could only have happened that way because they had formed a hole-and-corner brand of coalition against my influence. Pathetic, really.
That also explains another situation. I erred in thinking this was like other bands, that after a very short time they would clue in that I was the stage darling and adapt. Not this bunch. Oh, you bet your ass they noticed it every time. But you can’t really admonish anybody for doing a super job. Yet soon six months and then a year goes by and they have not said a thing. Just sniping whenever I played anything they thought was country.
You know, I never did tell them that they sewered themselves by canceling out on that one gig I booked. That’s the one they said they’d play, then backed out a week later. After I had put up posters and invited half the town. I see now it was the drummer arguing that they could not allow a bassist (they barely knew me at that time) to gain the slightest modicum of control or influence on what was “his turf”. I attribute the problem to the drummer's power-tripping because the other two guys would not have turned down a convenient local gig. The drummer will probably never clue in that over that, these people will never hire any band he is in. Ever.
Because those people will never forgot that cancel. I went on to become King of Bingo. The band still eats up their Sundays practicing the same old songs and playing their twice annual circuit, which consists mainly of two ancient watering holes. Woody’s and the Cooper City Legion. $350 for a five-piece. Second worst money I ever made, after the Hippie.
Last Laugh
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
